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Plugin/Theme Competition

As the promised land of canonical plugins draws near, when WordPress plugins maintained by development teams rather than single developers working solo will hopefully become the norm*, we thought it would be fun to encourage people to think about working in development teams with a friendly competition. There will be two: one for themes, one for plugins. Time is short, so if you’re interested, read fast and start coding!

The Rules:
Each submission must have 2 or more contributors. At least one of these contributors needs to be a New York Metro resident, and present at WordCamp NYC on Sunday, November 15.

Submissions must be repo-ready. That is, they should be able to be submitted to the WordPress.org theme or plugin repositories and be accepted: no spam, no security holes, no duping an existing theme or plugin.

Submissions must be new creations, not yet released to the public. You can use something you’ve been working on as a starting point, but remember that you *must* have collaborators to enter the competition.

Plugins can do pretty much anything, but must be GPL and must be free (as in beer), and not be simply a giveaway to upsell add-ons that are not free and/or GPL.

Ditto themes. You can do a basic theme, you can do a framework, you can do something specific and functional like P2, whatever, but it needs to be original to get into the top 3. Just changing a few colors or shifting the layout of an existing theme will not suffice for the sake of this competition. You may submit WordPress *or* BuddyPress themes.

The Deadline:
Submissions must be completed by 11:59pm (NYC time) on November 7, 2009. Leave a comment on this post and point to where the judges can download the code for evaluation. In your comment, feel free to provide the “elevator pitch” for your submission, describing what makes it special, etc. Identify in the comment who is on your team (link to names), who is in NYC, and who will be attending WordCamp NYC. This will give the judges enough time to evaluate entries. Late entries will not be accepted.

The Judging:
Matt Mullenweg and other trusted WordPress-universe personalities will be evaluating submissions for code competency, user experience, and style. The top 3 plugin submissions and the top 3 theme submissions will be invited to face off at WordCamp NYC’s Sunday session, which will be held in a 1000-person auditorium. That’s a lot of potential users, employers, clients, and collaborators.

Each team will have a few minutes to introduce their submissions, and then the judges will let you know what they liked and disliked about your entry, after which teams will have a chance to respond (think Project Runway for open source software). After all teams have been evaluated, the judges will announce a winning theme and a winning plugin. These winners will be congratulated (and their winning submissions promoted) on the official WordPress Development blog at http://wordpress.org/development, which reaches millions of people, once the submissions have been uploaded to the WordPress.org repositories.

19 Responses

Why the limitation “New York Metro resident”… I would not be able to make it to NYC but would like to work on a plugin with developers I’ve met at other WordCamps who are attending WordCamp NY but don’t live there.

@Pete: The reason is because this isn’t a national or international contest, it’s a contest being held as part of a local NYC event. It’s important to me that WordCamps don’t just turn into traveling lecture circuits, with the same WP rockstars turning up at all of them. Each should have its own local flavor. In keeping with that, since we wanted to encourage collaboration in dev projects with this local contest, but also wanted to acknowledge NYC’s status as a crossroads for people from all over the world, we opted for a compromise. There are hundreds of awesome developers in the NYC metro area; it should not be hard to find one to join your team and collaborate for the last week and a half if you want to enter the contest. Good luck!

Have you tried emailing the wp-hackers list? The wp-pro list? Posting in the plugins forum on wordpress.org? Posting in the forums on wptavern? There are many places online that plugin developers congregate… you’re welcome to use the comments on this site to find collaborators, but if you’re not having luck (a lot of people just get our posts by email subscription), some of those other places would probably yield you more results.

Our submission is a fork of the Thematic Framework (by Ian Stewart) and an original child theme. In a standard WordPress or WPMU blog, the framework is functionally interchangeable with Thematic. The child theme works with either this framework or Thematic. In a WPMU site running BuddyPress, the BuddyPress functionality included in the framework is active on both home and member blogs.

Although there is a significant amount of interest in developing BuddyPress enabled themes, the learning curve with the BuddyPress hooks, filters, template tags and extended template structure is significant. Writing a new theme framework system from scratch would not have significantly reduced that learning curve. Ron chose the Thematic Framework as a basis for this framework because it has been downloaded 125K+ times and a segment of the community is already familiar with it. With this framework, those people can build BuddyPress ready original child themes without learning the BuddyPress hooks, filters, template tags and extended template structure.

Daisy is a freelancer who develops WordPress based sites using custom themes and child themes. The framework enabled her to create the Coffee with Friends child theme using a framework environment that she was familiar with.

This plugin is something we have worked a lot together. We created it to customize the WP backend for clients when we use WordPress as a CMS.

Custom Admin allows the user or developer to upload images and a new favicon to be used in the backend. It also allows for the “Posts” menu item to be renamed and the “Pages” menu item to be moved first in the line up next to “Dashboard”.

The branding customizations include a custom logo in the header, customized footer with developer link, customized login page logo. All of this can be done from with in the Custom Admin Settings area.

The menu customization also allows the admin to remove menu items that are not being used and to remove extra menu items for non-admins to keep the menu focused for clients.

“Music Label WP” is a WordPress plugin for Music Labels. With a few lines of code (in the plugin) and JQuery scripts, the complexities of managing media and related metadata for music labels are made extremely simple. Thus, “Net Labels” can leverage the power and ease of use of WordPress to easily control their own branding at a cost much lower than previously possible for a custom music label site.

This plugin is in alpha and changing daily until we release the beta on November 13, 2009.

We have created “Music Label WP” as a WordPress plugin that takes content managed in a free Loud Feed account and automatically populates your WordPress site. Whether you’re an established Music Label or starting your own Net Label, this plugin leverages WordPress for the ease of creating and skinning your own site possible with content that Loud Feed stores in Amazon S3. Loud Feed offers a publishing workflow for all your music content (albums, artists, songs, shows, promotions, widgets and related metadata).

Content for artists and albums displayed on the “plugin” site are from the GoinNative Label, whose custom site we developed in Ruby on Rails and made us conclude that WordPress would offer more flexible and less expensive solutions. WordPress with the new Music Label WP plugin will now offer labels easy control over the WordPress front end, while leveraging the powerful Loud Feed Music Content Management System integrated with Amazon Web Services for unlimited scalability.

The plugin is being licensed as GPL Open Source and the Loud Feed platform itself is in the process of becoming licensed as GPL Open Source.

We are also planning to have the “Music Label WP” plugin work with BuddyPress for entities that represent multiple labels, from trade associations to distributors. We are about to launch this BuddyPress site for multiple labels, which is going into internal testing next week:http://a2im.prevuz.org/contents/?taxonomy=c_sitewide_group&term=label

In the future we see niche oriented communities being able to aggregate content from multiple labels by building on the WordPress/BuddyPress platform with the “Music Label WP” plugin that leverages Amazon Web Services. We also hope to begin to build relationships with Automattic, Instinct Entertainment and Shopp at Wordcamp to help ensure that by going Open Source GPL with Loud Feed, we can become a much needed standard and increase the likelihood of the success of Loud Feed’s mission to do for the music industry what Automattic has done for publishing with the WordPress platform.

We are ready, but have not yet submitted to the WordPress.org plugin repository because of this contest’s requirement that the submission has not been previously released to the public. We created a quick site today to explain the plugin and offer the download for this contest, (so it just became public). We should have a new release tomorrow. I had to upload an earlier release because of the submission deadline and nonavailability of the other team members on a Saturday.

It has been said that the majority of readers don’t comment on blog posts because they don’t feel like they have anything specific to add to a conversation.

This plugin allows you to prompt your readers to comment by asking them to answer a question specific to that post. A simple box with text that you define when writing your post is added above the comment form. The box can be styled to match your site by adjusting some predefined options.

It has been said that the majority of readers don’t comment on blog posts because they don’t feel like they have anything specific to add to a conversation.

This plugin allows you to prompt your readers to comment by asking them to answer a question specific to that post. A simple box with text that you define when writing your post is added above the comment form. The box can be styled to match your site by adjusting some predefined options.

New member moderation – If turned on any new members will have to be approved by an administrator before interacting with any BuddyPress elements of the site including sending messages, adding friends, wire posts, joining/creating groups and more. New members will also not be listed in any directories until approved. From the settings page administrators can approve or deny new member accounts.

Join groups at registration – From the settings page administrators can check off which groups they would like members to have a choice of joining at registration. If any groups are private and moderation is on admins will be able to approve, deny or ban members to or from groups along with approving their member accounts in one action.

Join blogs at registration – From the settings page administrators can check off which blogs they would like members to have a choice of joining at registration.

Custom Email alert messages – Admins can define what approval or denial messages are sent if moderation is on.

This plugin should help anyone who is administering a WordPress website and needs more control over the powerful plugins section. This plugin is also great for blocking updates on plugins that you have modified.

This theme helps travelers or photographers easily create a site to share their journey. By incorporating Colorbox JS image handling, both galleries and single images are easy to navigate via thumbnails and JS pop-ups. The Italic Smile theme also highlights the most recent posts so they may be easily selected while offering widget capabilities for archives, categories, tags and pages as desired.

The code is simple, easy to modify, and open for graphic expansion!

The Italic Smile theme is based on this travel site built by Tim Bowen during a recent trip through China >> http://puertour.com

This plugin is designed to make it easier for bloggers to offer image link code that other bloggers and websites can place on their own sites to link back. We have found that it’s difficult to create this type of code in posts and pages. The output displays a non-linked image along with linked html code placed in a read-only TextArea. The on clicking the code is selected and ready to be copied and pasted.

An options page is available to set shortcode defaults. A TinyMCE button is added to the visual editor to assist in placing the shortcode in posts and pages. Link URL, Image URL, and a title used for title and alt tags are configurable.

We added a few small bug fixes to Custom Admin. 1.9.6 now. If anyone downloaded it, grab the latest version. http://labs.jcow.com/custom-admin.zip Thanks to Damon Cook who helped with some bug testing. Great finds!